A Hidden Witch (A Modern Witch Series: Book 2) (2 page)

Sophie:
Someone should have
mentioned she was having trouble. I have a couple of crystals that
will help, and I’ll blend her some tea.

Nell:
That would be great,
Sophie. I need to send Ginia out to train with you—we’re really
short on healers here, and I’d love to know if she’s got that
talent.

Sophie:
With her earth power
and affinity for plants, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Moira:
Bring Ginia this
summer, Nell. We’ve healers here, especially with Sophie coming to
visit as well. If Ginia’s got healing talents, that’s just one more
reason to gather in one place for a time.

Nell:
A week attempting to
laze on the beach sounds good to me. Just let me work out the
logistics. In the meantime, should I tweak the fetching spell to
find witches who aren’t actively practicing the craft, or leave it
alone?

Moira:
If we’re having
ourselves a training gathering, then it seems like fortuitous
timing to find someone who might be untrained.

Sophie:
When can you have the
spell adjusted, Nell?

Nell:
I think the girls have
been working on it in secret. There’s an encrypted folder on our
network called Codename: Hidden Witch.

Sophie:
Ginia’s turned into
an awesome spellcoder. She’s kicking all our butts in Realm.

Nell:
That’s my girl. I’ll
see what they’ve got, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we’re ready to
go in time for our regular chat tonight.

Moira:
In that case, I’ll
have myself a wee bit of dinner and talk to the both of you in a
couple of hours.

~ ~ ~

Elorie could feel her hands cramping, and the
natural light was getting dim enough that she had to squint to see
the delicate silver wires she was twisting together. This
particular piece of sea glass was one of her favorites, a brilliant
blue that made her think of Venice.

Blues were the rarest of her beach finds and she
hoarded them, only dipping into that jar when she wanted to make a
particularly special piece. This was a necklace for Gran, and it
didn’t come any more special than that. Gran shared her love for
the history and resilience the sea glass represented.

Elorie liked to imagine the long life of each
treasure she worked on. She held the bit of glass up in the dying
light, studying its shape one more time. Perhaps this one had been
part of a bottle sitting on the dressing table of a fine lady in
Venice, or one crossing the Atlantic on a ship. It might have been
tossed overboard, or the ship come to an untimely end. And then the
broken pieces of glass had tumbled in the ocean waters, fighting
with pebbles and sand to come to rest at last on a lonely Nova
Scotia beach, perhaps waiting centuries for her eyes to find
it.

Elorie made a mental note to have some friends
over for dinner soon. Getting all misty-eyed about her glass was a
sure sign she’d been too much of a hermit lately. It was for a good
cause; she had a growing pile of gorgeous new work ready for the
Art Fair in San Francisco.

It was rare for her to venture beyond the
borders of her home province, but under Aaron’s gentle pressure,
she’d submitted her designs to the continent’s most prestigious art
show and been selected for one of their emerging artist slots. It
was a high honor, and quite a bump in her nice, stable life.

Truth be told, it was rather terrifying.

Since the natural light was now entirely gone,
she gave up trying to finalize the setting for Gran’s necklace and
began to tidy her workspace. She always left one work-in-progress
lying on her desk as inspiration for the next day. With a last
touch to the jewel-blue glass, cooling now without her fingers to
keep it warm, she started the more mundane tasks of organizing her
tools and sweeping the floor.

Her laptop pinged with an incoming instant
message, Aaron’s solution to having to leave the inn to get her
attention. Seemed a little silly when a shout out the back door
would work, but evidently she’d ignored one too many of those.
Dinner was probably ready. She sat down at the computer to let him
know she’d be up to the house shortly.

Nell:
The spell is fetching
someone now… her name is Elorie.

Sophie:
Hello, Elorie, and
welcome to Witches’ Chat. We’re delighted to have you join us!

Elorie:
What a nice surprise!
Hello Nell, Sophie. I’ve heard all about your chat room from Gran.
I can’t stay for long—I was just about to let Aaron know I was on
my way up for supper.

Moira:
Hello, my sweet girl.
It’s good to have you here, and a wee bit of a surprise, as well.
Nell’s fetching spell must have misfired. We were looking for some
new witches for our chat. Perhaps one of the students was on your
computer earlier.

Elorie:
That wouldn’t be a
surprise. Kevin’s fascinated by anything electronic.

Nell:
Hang on a minute; I’m
looking at the code now. Sorry, Elorie—not sure what went wrong.
It’s nice to “see” you again, however.

Sophie:
Your show’s coming up
soon, isn’t it?

Elorie:
It is. I’ll be
heading out in less than a week now. Nell, do you still have room
for me to stay with you?

Nell:
We always have room. If
you want a little more quiet, though, Jamie and Nat would be happy
to have you. Their house is starting to look pretty lived in, but
it could use a guest or two to get rid of the new house smell.

Elorie:
Either one is fine,
and appreciated.

Nell:
So, I hate to ask a
dumb question, but the code for the fetching spell is getting a
clear power reading on your end, Elorie.

Moira:
Well, it can’t be from
Elorie. If she were a witch, we’d have detected it long since.

Elorie:
Maybe a student,
then?

Nell:
No, the spell is
specific to an individual, not a computer. And it’s an untrained
power signature again. Kevin’s had enough training that his would
look more like the actively practicing witches we’ve been chatting
with lately.

Elorie:
I don’t understand
what that means.

Nell:
It means my code is
suggesting you’re an untrained witch, but that doesn’t make any
sense.

Sophie:
Has anyone run a scan
on you lately, Elorie?

Elorie:
We both got scanned
often enough growing up. You can’t possibly believe I’ve got magic
now, Soph.

Sophie:
I’m sorry, I wasn’t
thinking. I know it was hard for you then, and I’m really sorry
we’ve managed to stick our finger in it again somehow.

Elorie:
It was a long time
ago, and no apologies needed. I’m happy your magic grew, and I
stopped crying about the lack of mine a long time ago. And now I
really do need to run—there are perogies for dinner, and I’m
starving. Good night, all.

Sophie:
Ouch.

Moira:
Oh, dear.

Nell:
I feel like we stepped
in something there, and I don’t know the whole story. Anyone care
to fill me in?

Moira:
Elorie has always
longed to be a witch, ever since she was a small girl. She hides it
very well now, but I don’t know that she’s ever really grown out of
it. I was so certain she would develop power that I wasn’t as
careful as I might have been in helping her accept the
alternatives.

Sophie:
Non-witches are as
welcome as any witch, Aunt Moira—you’ve always made sure of
that.

Moira:
Of course they are,
but the magic has always called to her. Normally when a witchling
has that kind of attraction to the craft, their powers emerge at
some point, but hers never did. And it was doubly hard with her and
Sophie being so close. You handle that beautifully with your
triplets, Nell—I didn’t handle it nearly so well.

Nell:
Not to ignore the
history, but maybe she should be tested again. It sounds like she
hasn’t been scanned in a while. I swear, my code says she’s a
witch. Maybe your instincts weren’t wrong.

Sophie:
She’s around
practicing witches and active circle work all the time. It’s hard
to believe she has stealth witching talents we’ve all failed to
notice.

Nell:
Yeah, active power
streams usually make any nearby untrained talents pretty
obvious.

Moira:
It shames me somewhat
to say it, but she’s been scanned much more recently than she
knows. I stopped telling her when I do it, since it saddens her so,
but it’s been no more than a few months since I last checked.

Sophie:
And we’ve surely
saddened her and you again tonight. I’m so sorry, Aunt Moira.

Nell:
Crap. I’ll debug my
code and try not to screw up again. Sorry—with the girls doing most
of the work on this, I’ve obviously missed something. No excuses,
but we’ll go through it with a fine-toothed comb tomorrow.

Moira:
Not to worry. Aaron
will tend to her heart; he’s a very good man.

Elorie closed the door of her studio and leaned
against it, sucking in the brisk ocean air. No, dammit. She was not
going to let this get to her. Teenagers got to cry about the powers
they wanted and didn’t get. Grown women needed to make peace with
the life they had.

She had a good one, and right now, it involved a
big plate of perogies.

Elorie figured that at twenty-six, she’d looked
at more small rocks than most people would see in three lifetimes.
Finding sea glass on the beach was the art of scanning and letting
your eye catch the unusual, the bright glimpse of color in a sprawl
of gray and brown.

Which would be simpler if ocean pebbles actually
were gray and brown. Especially when wet, the stones on the beach
were an astonishing variety of colors, with glints of gold and
green and occasional glimpses of almost every other color in
nature. Add in fragments of pretty shell and unidentified chunks of
sea crud, and it wasn’t as easy as you might think to spot the
hidden bits of tumbled glass.

Elorie had loved hunting for them ever since she
was a little girl. Her mother would bring her to the beach, making
up stories about the glass and where it had been. She remembered
the first time she’d taken a treasure find, suspended it from a
black shoelace with dental floss, and presented it as a Mother’s
Day gift.

It had taken fifteen years and the shoelace
breaking to convince Mom to let her put that little piece of purple
glass on a proper chain with a handcrafted silver-wire setting. And
she was pretty sure her mother still had the shoelace remains
tucked away somewhere.

Sentimental, maybe, but now that she was
considering a baby of her own, it was a little easier to understand
why Mom had worn a shoelace around her neck for a decade and a
half.

As she strolled along the beach, Elorie rubbed
her belly and pondered what it would be like to grow a baby.
Children weren’t much of a mystery when you’d grown up surrounded
by them, but having a baby inside you was a wonder. Aaron had been
dropping hints lately. Maybe after she got back from San
Francisco.

A piece of water-blue glass caught her
attention, and she reached down to tuck its wet coolness in her
pocket. This beach was out of the way enough to have quite a
scattering of finds left by the ocean waters. She could afford to
ignore the brown and green glass and just seek out the rare and
special colors—the blues, reds, and purples that hadn’t been made
for centuries.

The next piece to catch her attention was
perfectly round and a deep cerulean blue. A child’s marble from
centuries ago, rough now from its ocean voyage. It would make a
gorgeous necklace if she could bear to part with it. Her studio and
home were littered with small treasures she couldn’t resist
keeping.

Elorie slid the marble into her cargo pocket and
walked over to a sunny rock. Time for lunch and listening to the
waves for a while.

The morning mists had burned off, but the air
still felt wet—not enough wind today to chase the spray away.
Unusual for this stretch of beach. The tide was out, the smells of
seaweed and salt all a little riper under the noonday sun.

She was well aware the main purpose of her
morning escape hadn’t been to increase her sea-glass stash. It was
the old hurts in her heart that needed the soothing ritual of the
treasure hunt. Another thing she’d learned as a grown woman—doing
was often far more soothing than crying.

Even Aaron, fully content as a non-witch, didn’t
truly understand what it was to know the desire of your childhood
would never come to be.

For as long as Elorie could remember, she had
assumed she would be a witch. Gran was a witch, and the history and
the craft called to her blood. Or at least that’s what she’d
believed as a young child, waiting for her powers to emerge.

She’d thrown herself into the lessons taken by
all young ones in the witching community, and sat for hours
listening to Gran talk of witches past.

Then she’d tried to be patient as a teen, as so
many around her came into their powers. Watched in an agony of envy
as Sophie had grown into her magic. Gran had scanned her regularly,
and Elorie knew that she still did, seeking traces of talent in her
beloved granddaughter. Nothing had ever appeared.

Walking the beaches in search of sea glass had
turned from childhood treasure-seeking into a kind of therapy, and
from there, into a purpose and direction for her adult life. She
was an artist, a wife, a dancer, a trainer. Not a witch, and she’d
come to terms with that.